Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Finnish academic male choir KYL has been touring Japan. The tour included 5 concerts, from which 4 were fully booked. The tour also included lots of other finno-japanese cultural exchange.

The special kicker in this case was that at the same time, the Choir was spreading Bitcoin propaganda to Japan, as LocalBitcoins was sponsoring the concert. LocalBitcoins was prominently displayed in the tour t-shirts, as well in the concert promotional material.

At the same time, Japanese translation was made to LocalBitcoins, making it more usable for Japanese audience.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

LocalBitcoins is proud to announce automated trading support on both online and local trades. Previously only buying Bitcoins with cash was supported through API.

In addition there is a full dashboard API available to cultivate and monitor your currently active and past trades.

The expanded API is available immediately. Please refer to the API documentation for the up-to-date details.

The API enables faster, more reliable trading. You can use the API to automate and enforce your business logic and earn more, or just to lose the hassle in filing the tax report.

Your feedback is important in the direction and focus of the development of the API. Please do continue to contact about your issues and wishes about the API as well as about your use cases either to our support form or by joining our chat.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

LocalBitcoins received a very dangerous attack against the site infrastructure on Saturday 3.5.2014.For now

All user data and Bitcoins are safe;

The site will be down for a while as the system is being rebuilt

Details

LocalBitcoins hosting provided received a request to restart the LocalBitcoins.com website server and give access to the server console (root) on Sat May 3 13:32:27. LocalBitcoins team did not initiate this request. For now, it looks like the request was made using spoofed email addresses and other weakness in the hosting provider support system.

LocalBitcoins team was alerted about the abnormal activity when the hosting provider restarted the server.

The attacker gained a root access to the server for ~40 minutes before the attacker was kicked out and the server shutdown.

All data on the website server is encrypted. Manual actions are needed to make this data readable, so the attacker could not gain access to the data even when having a server console access.

It is very unlikely that the attacker gained access to any data; LocalBitcoins is still performing full investigation on the matter.

Bitcoins in hot wallet and cold wallet are safe, as LocalBitcoins runs its bitcoind and wallets on a separate server.

LocalBitcoins team has started to rebuild the website server on fresh hardware.

LocalBitcoins team will make further announcements when the investigation proceeds and the site becomes available again. We expect to spend at least 24 hours on this. LocalBitcoins team apologizes the issues the downtime may cause to the users.

One would think that male choir signing and Bitcoin don't have much in common, but that is about to change. In an effort to promote Bitcoin to the vocal music enthusiasts, LocalBitcoins is supporting the KYL male choir tour to Japan.

The tour consists of four cities, including Hiroshima, Takamatsu, Saku and Tokyo.

The repertuaire includes Japanese songs, traditional finnish songs as well as international classics. Style ranges from pop to national romantic.

Tickets for the first concert, held in Helsinki, Finland can be acquired with Bitcoin. It is not yet known if tickets can be bought for Japanese concerts in BTC, but hopefully we will figure out .

LocalBitcoins.com will also be translated in to Japanese, to spread the Bitcoin adoption in Japan.